What happened

On 21 September, SEO observer Gagan Ghotra posted an 18-second screen recording on X. In it, he clicks a piece of bold, underlined text inside a Google AI Overview — text that looks exactly like a link — and lands in an AI Mode conversation rather than on any website. He wrote that Google “is now testing” these links. Search Engine Roundtable reported it the next day, and Search Engine Journal and other SEO outlets followed.

Google opened a route from AI Overviews into AI Mode some time ago. On 27 January, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, announced on Google’s blog that people could ask a follow-up question right from an AI Overview and carry on the conversation in AI Mode, on mobile, globally. That route only opens when the user decides to ask. What Ghotra recorded is text styled the same as any link that leads to a website.

Google hasn’t responded to the test. It hasn’t said how widely it’s running, in which markets, or whether it will stay.

Microsoft is testing too. From around 25 September, SEO observers spotted Bing’s Copilot Search tab, which sits alongside All, Images, Videos and Maps, relabelled “AI Mode”. Clicking it still goes to bing.com/copilotsearch — the same Copilot Search under a new name. Separately, Edge is testing an AI Mode button of its own in the address bar, which appears only when Bing is the default search engine. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has borrowed Google’s vocabulary: Bing previously tested calling the AI answers at the top of its results “AI Overviews”. Microsoft hasn’t commented on any of these tests either.

Why it matters to you

The links inside an AI Overview have been the doors from the summary to the web. A reader finishes the summary, wants more, clicks, and lands on somebody’s site. This test turns some of those doors towards AI Mode. The moment of wanting more is still there; where it lands is now another Google conversation.

What happens inside AI Mode has already been measured. A preprint experiment from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University found that US users confined to AI Mode clicked out to external sites 18.8 percentage points less than people on regular search (we’ve covered the full numbers). If links like these roll out, they send readers into a place already known to send fewer of them onward.

Taiwanese users are on the same road. According to Google’s January announcement, the follow-up route from AI Overviews into AI Mode opened on mobile globally, so users in Taiwan can already walk through it.

When Microsoft is willing to put a rival’s product name on its own product, our reading is that it has decided “AI Mode” is already the name users recognise for AI search, and that teaching them its own brand name instead isn’t worth the effort. The entrances are moving towards it one after another: links on Google, a tab on Bing, the address bar in Edge. Until now brands have cared whether the links point to them. From here, they need to care whether they’re still in the conversation after a reader has been carried into AI Mode.

What to do about it

Once a reader is in AI Mode, the conversation doesn’t stop at the first answer. They ask again, AI Mode answers again, and every new question regenerates the response, so who gets mentioned and whose pages get cited can change each time. Being named in the AI Overview doesn’t mean you’re still there by the third question.

The trouble is that readers’ questions don’t run in a straight line; they branch. One person starts with price, another with reviews, another with who you compare to, and down each branch the answers take a different shape. You can still be there two layers down one branch and gone two layers down the next. By the time you’ve walked the main branches, the model updates and the whole tree grows back differently. Finding out which branches you drop out of means walking them layer by layer, systematically, and walking them again every so often.

Book a session and we’ll follow your category’s line of questioning through AI Mode, one follow-up after another, and see how many layers deep you’re still in the answer.

Further reading